Coronavirus / COVID-19

[Montmorency]

Denver Post on the federal government confiscating purchased supplies.

Trump had only days before prevented Colorado Gov. Jared Polis from securing 500 ventilators from a private company, instead, taking the ventilators for the federal government. Polis sent a formal letter pleading for medical equipment, but the president took the time to make clear he was responding to a request from Gardner. We are left to believe that if Colorado didn’t have a Republican senator in office, our state would not be getting these 100 ventilators. How many ventilators would we be getting if we had a Republican governor and a second Republican senator? Would that indicate we had more Republican lives in our state worth saving for Trump and resources would start flowing? Should Utah be concerned that Sen. Mitt Romney voted to remove the president from office?

This behavior comes, of course, weeks after Trump informed states they would have to compete against one another in the procurement of medical supplies at a time of global shortages due to the coronavirus pandemic.

If the federal government turns out to be running a double-dip scam, outbidding states or outright stealing medical equipment to resell to connected private contractors who then turn around and front to the states and hospitals, that alone would be a transgression worthy of life imprisonment.


Toward the intersection of the pandemic and the electoral:

https://twitter.com/MSNBC/status/1247658663617138691
https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/...31484532928514

Absentee Ballots are a great way to vote for the many senior citizens, military, and others who can’t get to the polls on Election Day. These ballots are very different from 100% Mail-In Voting, which is “RIPE for FRAUD,” and shouldn’t be allowed!

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020...ppression.html

“Mail-in voting is horrible. It’s corrupt,” declared President Trump earlier this week. When a reporter asked how he could reconcile that position with the fact that he had personally voted by mail in the last election, Trump replied, “Because I’m allowed to.” This perfectly circular logic — if more voters were permitted to vote by mail, they would also be “allowed to” — seemed not to satisfy him. Trump has refined his view, explaining that casting a ballot by mail is fine for members of the military and senior citizens, but is “ripe for fraud” when used by others:

Trump is not even attempting to formulate a facially neutral principle. He is simply asserting that members of the military and senior citizens — constituencies that lean Republican — can be trusted not to commit voter fraud, but that constituencies that might vote Democratic cannot. He is willing to support accommodations to allow Republican-leaning voters to vote without risking their health, but refuses to support any such accommodations for Democrats. (Trump campaign officials already confirmed this to Politico — they will allow mail voting for senior citizens, but not others.) The travesty that was Tuesday’s election in Wisconsin is his plan to win in November.

It’s not clear if Democrats have fully grasped the gravity of what Trump and his party are attempting to do. The coronavirus poses a threat to elections in general, but a special threat to urban voters, who tend to face more crowded polling stations. Republicans are very willing to take active measures — like strict voter ID, or the poll tax Florida Republicans have tried to impose — but the virus makes active measures unnecessary. Republicans have calculated that the public-health threat of the virus will suppress the urban vote for them. All they have to do is block any changes to the election system and allow nature to run its course.

That Trump has never offered any nominal commitment to neutral application of government is a kind of defense if being sardonic. We're -this- close to banana republic status.

(Grimly, Trump mentioned "when they grab thousands of mail-in ballots, and they dump it" in disparaging broadened mail-in voting. I say grim because North Carolina Republicans were discovered to have perpetrated this exact form of electoral fraud in the 2018 midterms, so egregiously that the courts vacated the election result. It's like a kiddy diddler pulling a minor into their van with the admonition that 'there are a lot of creeps out there.' criminal scum.)



These last years have convinced me that we need to amend the Constitution to reintroduce attainder.